For years digital transformation has been endgame for the enterprise, the next plateau that would ensure market relevance through improved efficiency at a fraction of the cost. With hybrid cloud  addressing the complications of legacy workloads and disparate computing environments, the possibilities in cloud are virtually endless. Sometimes, that’s the problem.

A market flooded with promising new technologies can drown a business, paralyzing it with fear of choice or weighing it down with a portfolio full of exciting tools that ultimately do little for end users or the bottom line. The cloud’s greatest benefit lies in its customization capabilities, but that potential is wasted on organizations that lack a clear objective, according to Stephanie Trunzo (pictured), worldwide vice president of IBM Cloud Garage.

In a sea of overwhelming opportunity, IBM Cloud Garage is aimed at helping enterprises identify real business needs, guiding them on a more holistic path to true digital transformation. “We talk in the Cloud Garage about guided transformation as a way of helping our clients not only apply digital to processes that they already have in place, but also think about culture — new ways of working,” Trunzo said.

Trunzo spoke with John Furrier and Dave Vellante, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IBM Think event in San Francisco. (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE spotlights Stephanie Trunzo in its Women in Tech feature.

A new perspective on modernization

Trunzo is an IBM veteran, with 13 years under her belt working in roles ranging from technical writer to executive architect to software development manager and more. The multidisciplinary technologist left the company in 2013 to build her own business, Point Source, an information technology support service company specializing in mobile enterprise solutions.

Trunzo recently sold PointSource LLC and is back in her second term at IBM. According to Trunzo, her experience ushering the enterprise into a new digital era at PointSource primed her for the role of leading IBM Cloud Garage worldwide.

“Cloud Garage is taking a new approach to how we interact with our clients from an IBM perspective,” she said. “It’s very similar to what we did at PointSource, [taking] this digital transformation, digital agency approach to looking at business outcomes first.”

The IBM Cloud Garage is a network of global innovation centers where customers work alongside IBM experts to identify desired business outcomes and hone strategies to meet those aims through the latest cloud technologies. The modernization is intended to go beyond the technical, providing new digital processes and tools, as well as team reskilling for a more functional, future-proofed organization.

“Clients are looking for people to coach them on making decisions, bring expertise to the table so that they have sustainable frameworks and are skilling people up in these new modern technologies,” Trunzo stated.

‘The sky’s the limit’

Although transformation has been mission critical throughout the industry, many businesses continue to face roadblocks on their digital journeys. Significant challenges stem from business choices motivated by shiny technologies that aren’t necessarily solutions for existing customer problems, according to Trunzo.

“People get excited about new technologies, and so often it’s a solution looking for a problem,” she said.

Through Cloud Garage, Trunzo guides customers to develop modernization strategies around the end user and avoid distractions that masquerade as progress. “Some challenges people have [are] not spending enough time focusing on users, taking an outside-in approach,” she said. “We help make sure we’re identifying business outcomes and what they want to test. It’s real, iterative learning.”

The Cloud Garage begins its engagement process with customers by first identifying the priority business opportunity, and then developing an actionable roadmap around tentpole goals. “We define success criteria upfront. Those criteria then are the things that we’re testing as part of the MVP [minimum viable product] process,” Trunzo said.

Cloud Garage customers are currently exploring solutions for a range of cloud complexities: security protocols, user conversion, marketing goals and more. Designed to encourage innovation, the Cloud Garage sees some of the most cutting-edge concepts and technologies in the industry today.

“We’ve had projects with blockchain tracking fish in streams in a farm-to-table scenario,” she said. “With Watson image recognition, we can tell what the fish is and digitally imprint an ID on it. The sky’s the limit on what we can build an MVP for.”

IBM Cloud Garage serves customers out of 15 locations worldwide, with spaces designed to foster collaborative creative problem solving. The team also travels to work onsite with customers who may not have access to a central location.

“They’re activity spaces built for purpose around the world,” Trunzo said “We can do a framing workshop, which helps identify business opportunities, the first step in the journey, and get you moving quickly.”

The IBM team works alongside customers to share learnings in real time. By the end of an average three-month engagement cycle, the customer has a minimum viable product and a wealth of new skills to implement and expand upon in their organization.

“To go the whole way from identifying an opportunity, testing it, and having real results, it’s pretty fast,” she said.

Rearchitecting with intention

The relatively rapid Cloud Garage development process is a change of pace for many enterprise customers, whose legacy systems have been developed with a series of compounding technologies over the course of decades. “One microdecision after another took place over 10, 15, 20 years,” Trunzo said. “Your architecture reflects that.”

That technological sediment doesn’t typically make for the most efficient, streamlined architectures. In Cloud Garage workshops, Trunzo and her team look to empower businesses not only to improve management process with new technology, but to reconfigure overall business processes with a more conscious approach.

“Cloud offers this unique opportunity to look at your architecture going forward with an intentional mindset — resetting the clock on those architectural decisions that have accrued over a time,” she said.

Rearchitecting 30 years worth of layered technology can be daunting, but Cloud Garage is aimed at helping make transformation more accessible by guiding customers through every step, Trunzo explained. IBM has positioned itself as the bridge between legacy and future tech, and its Garage embodies the collaborative open-source approach the company has committed to taking in hybrid cloud.

Trunzo’s work ultimately propels enterprise customers through digital transformation, but she said the buzzy term is an inadequate representation of the comprehensive process and cultural overhaul she and her team aim to implement through Cloud Garage.

“There are so many things that are broader than just digital about transformation,” she said. “We think about how they take a new modern approach to their technology.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Think event. (* Disclosure: IBM sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither IBM nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE